Tag Archives: Horror

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Taking a group of people, shoving them onto a tropical island, setting upon them some kind of “force”, and then watching how they react is just about as popular a subgenre of horror as the group of people trapped in a small location with some kind of monster or crazed human unleashed on them movie. Other memorable tropical island horror movies I can think of include the Blood Island trilogy (Brides Of Blood/The Mad Doctor Of Blood Island/Beast Of Blood) from the late 60s/early 70s, Screamers/Island Of The Fishmen (1979), the more recent After Dusk They Come (2009), and its remake The Lost Tribe (2009).

With Big Ass Spider! we come to the end of this latest giant spider movie resurgence that involved two other movies, Spiders 3D (2013) and The Giant Spider (2013) both of which hit home video earlier in the year. Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers) crafts a comedy/science fiction tale about exterminator, Alex Mathis (Greg Grunberg), who teams up with security guard, Jose Ramos (Lombardo Boyar), to stop a giant spider from turning downtown LA into its own personal playground. Ray Wise plays Major Braxton Tanner who’s tasked with trying to “clean-up” the Giant Spider mess and begrudgingly help Mathis and Ramos along the way, or vice versa, depending on how you want to look at it.

The “crawling hand/possessed body parts” sub-genre is one that frightened me badly early in life, as most horror movies tended to do back then. It’s a toss up, as far as my memory is concerned, which came first, The Crawling Hand (1963) or Doctor Terror’s House Of Horrors (1965)? I tend to think the latter movie, but that may only be because the crawling hand segment in that anthology was the most frighteningly memorable. The fear on that one didn’t even begin with a viewing of the movie. Being a little kid, commercials and trailers for horror movies tended to have a jolting effect on me and I remember seeing a commercial for Doctor Terror’s House Of Horrors, and that disembodied hand threatening Christopher Lee left it’s mental mark early on.

Our benevolent editor-lord won’t stop irritating me about writing something about Halloween for her quaint little website. Since I’m the master of having a good time, I offered to put together a list of suggestions for what you should be doing on the best night of the year, Halloween. If you don’t take any of my suggestions, you are a fool.

As a kid, I took being a pussy to extraordinary heights. Being scared was the only thing I was good at. Well, no, that’s not true. I was good at watching TV. And when everything scares you, being a pussy was a given in my TV watching. Before the age of remotes, I would sit right in front of the screen, always at the ready to bail on the channel when something spooky popped up. Considering that everything scared me, an outsider might’ve observed that my rapid channel changing might be attributed to a case of ADD or that I was just a child of the ’90s. I wasn’t seeking thrills, I was conflicted. Every day, I would force myself to participate in my favorite and least favorite activity at the same time. Being 3 – 10 years old, it was a little confusing. Here’s a short list of the things I was afraid of…

Now and then you come across a movie that leaves you thinking about it for days or even weeks afterward. After hearing about V/H/S from some friends of mine, I decided to pick that bad boy up. It was good. Totally good. It was one of those movies you start discussing immediately with your friends, going over all the “that was fucking sweet”s and “dude, what if”s. It was a found-footage style movie and, unlike so many movies today, there was a mystery to it. Well, this is about the sequel, V/H/S/2. So if you were expecting to read how awesome the predecessor was, look somewhere else. Or just watch it. Seriously dude.

Let me be rather up front: theoretically speaking, I am inclined to be a Chucky fan. First off, I just fucking hate children. When I see children fall down or get scared by animals in real life, I’m overcome with joy. So for someone who targets children specifically, it’s euphoric to see a doll with Bradley Dorff’s voice show up and get wicked.

Second off, Child’s Play is the best ‘80s horror movie, and that’s a straight up fact. I don’t find pedophiles or retards scary, so that eliminates Sweaterman and Masky Down Syndrome. In fact, I think most retards should wear hockey masks since that would make them less scary when you see them in public. Personally, I think John Landis single-handedly provided the lowest point in ‘80s horror, as he actually filmed people dying and didn’t have the common courtesy to leave it in the final cut. So of course, by process of elimination, Child’s Play is the best.

I’ve been ghost-hunting from an armchair since my grade school years. That’s when I first encountered a book called, The Demonologist: The True Story Of Ed And Lorraine Warren by Gerald Brittle. I came across it in a grocery store while grocery shopping with my mother. The book has been reprinted many, many times, and it has just gotten yet another reprint this September due to The Conjuring’s success at the box office this past summer. The 2013 cover isn’t as impressive or as eye-catching as the cover used in its initial printing back in 1980; a red cover with a black border and this crooked, black cross in the middle.

When you were a kid, did you watch the same movie repeatedly for weeks or even months at a time? Can you still recite The Lion King? Or Aladdin? I just name those because that’s what my siblings and I watched over and over and over again. Disney’s Hocus Pocus was also one of those movies we made sure my parents were sick of.

I told You Won Cannes superstar editor, Madeleine, that I was considering reviewing the children’s Halloween classic, she gave my her blessing and I think I actually started floating a little. Then I realized that I was already set on giving this movie a positive review based on nostalgia alone. So I decided to fix that and watch this children’s movie like the 30 year old man that I am.

On August 2nd 1985 a movie called, Fright Night, opened nation-wide in movie theaters. It was about a high-schooler named Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) who learns his new next-door neighbor is undead. Writer/Director, Tom Holland, breathed new life into the vampire mythology with this film. I was sixteen and a junior in high school when it came out; I recall seeing the many commercials for it and having no idea what it was about, watching Sarandon saunter slowly down the stairs and utter the now iconic line, “Welcome to Fright Night . . . . for real.” It wasn’t until I was in school one day, that this kid who sat behind me whom I talked to on occasion told me he had seen it, and I remember saying to him, “Oh, it’s a vampire movie?!”

I was thrown by the fact that Holland’s vampires looked demonic and that Dandridge only looked that way when he got angry. Seeing that huge, weird, flying creature was stupefying as well. Before this flick, vampires in movies typically changed into normal looking bats. Dandridge did no such thing; his bat form was hairless, huge and looked more like something that had flown straight out of hell.